Ruben Guthrie Is As Terrible As The Film's Name Is

18 July 2015 | 10:46 am | Anthony Carew

The complete cockhole to end all complete cockholes.

ruben guthrie

If you think Ruben Guthrie is a terrible name for a film, well, you wait until you see the actual film. In it, the name is intoned, again and again, and always in full; as if the man who bears it borders on myth. Hell, even Ruben Guthrie (Patrick Brammall) speaks about himself in the third person. If that makes him sound like a complete cockhole, well, so does every other thing that comes out of his mouth.

Brendan Cowell’s script —based on a somehow-acclaimed stage-play— imagines its titular cad as an anti-hero, but it gives us nothing by which he earns that status. He’s a charismatic drunk working in advertising, so perhaps the model was Don Draper. But Cowell never shows his main character at work; instead, he lazily has other characters tell us Ruben Guthrie’s a genius, Ruben Guthrie’s the greatest creative this firm has ever had, Ruben Guthrie’s won world advertising awards four years running. In fact, Ruben Guthrie says the latter out loud, himself, several times over. Because, y’know, complete cockhole.

Our complete cockhole is set on a journey towards self-discovery, when he hits a drunken-low and his cut-out-caricature Czech-supermodel fiancée (played with a terrible accent by Abbey Lee) walks out on him. If he can stay sober for a year, she’ll see about coming back. It’s at this point, you realise that Cowell expects you to care whether this complete cockhole —a born-into-privilege, ultra-wealthy, ultra-white, private-school-educated, egotistical, entitled, judgmental, self-centred, macho male— can get his life together, and get the girl.

Making films about rich cockholes is one thing entirely; but nothing here scans as social commentary, satire, or incisive writing. Just because the film’s named after him, the audience is expected to care whether a man who gets whatever he wants gets whatever he wants. At times, this seems accidentally audacious, but, mostly, it plays as utterly clueless.

Cowell attempts to create empathy for his titular character by comparative cockholeishness: surrounding Ruben Guthrie (that name again: Ruben Guthrie!) with even-more-awful people, one-note caricatures saying even-more-offensive things. There’s Jeremy Sims as repellent boss, Brenton Thwaites as millennial cliché incarnate, Jack Thompson as boozehound dad, Robyn Nevin as neurotic mum, Alex Dimitriades as screaming queer; all staggering around with drinks in their hands, all enablers daring to distract our hero from his noble quest.

Seeing all this terrible pretending-to-be-drunk acting is reminiscent of another film Cowell wrote, the dreadful Ten Empty. That film was a sneering, puffed-up portrait of drunken lower-class bogans that somehow saw its blue-singlet-and-Blundstones dress-ups as a badge of authenticity. Ruben Guthrie has no such delusions of nobility, but it’s just as insincere, just as two-dimensional, just as fond of cheap cliché. For any progress Cowell’s made as a writer —somewhere, within, lies an interesting drama about the grey areas between alcohol abuse and addiction, a commentary on the blanket treatment of addiction with the same 12 self-help steps— he can still only sketch implausible characters, and remains weirdly out-of-tune with actual human behaviour.

As Cowell’s directorial debut, Ruben Guthrie doesn’t show much filmmaking promise, either. Its tone is wildly uneven, its pace scattershot. There’s bad dream sequences, over-determined musical cues, and so many montages. At its nadir, when our anti-hero falls back off the wagon, Cowell moves from montage to montage: first happily depicting a wild booze-up with blasts of brassy horns, then switching, the second go-round, to slow-motion shots set to a piano-ballad; just to let you know that alcohol is bad and stuff.

It’s a piece of cut-rate direction that’s indicative of the film’s greater dramatic flaws. Ruben Guthrie is supposed to play as cautionary tale on when a good-time gets pushed too far, but it’s far more interested in glorifying Guthrie’s hard-partying heroics. This, too, is another estimation of his manliness, his swagger, his genius: that even a critique comes out like a commendation. And along the ride, as much as our anti-hero supposedly ‘grows’, he comes out the other side as he came in: the entitled prat who perceives the world as revolving around him. The film’s obsession with saying its lead character’s name is supposed to make him out to be a living myth, but instead he lands somewhere between utterly uninteresting and unspeakably insufferable; the complete cockhole to end all complete cockholes. 

paper towns

With a soundtrack blasting hot indie jams (Vampire Weekend! Son Lux! War On Drugs! Twin Shadow! Haim! Holy fuck is that Robin Pecknold singing Joanna Newsom?!) and all your favourite teen-movie clichés in tow (House parties! Prom! Road-trips! A literature teacher reading from a classic novel whose themes reflect the story! That classic scene overlooking the shitty town you’re desperate to leave behind!), Paper Towns is the latest film to be adapted from John Green’s burgeoning YA empire.

It gives us Nat Wolff as the uptight geek who stays on the straight-and-narrow out of adolescent fear, dutifully working towards that imagined future —30, a doctor, wife-and-two-kids— that will bring him the happiness high-school doesn’t. What does such an uptight white male need to shake him out of the doldrums? Why, it’s Cara Delevingne’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl, set to blow through his world in a best-night-of-his-life storm of impulsive whimsy and wa-hey! craziness, only to vanish the next day.

From that very-generic set-up, the story —written for screen by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who also adapted The Fault In Our Stars, not to mention Tim Tharp’s The Spectacular Now— moves from an unconvincing mystery into a far-more-interesting portrait of runamok fantasy and romantic projection. At times, there’s even echoes of The Virgin Suicides in the way the unknowable, vanished girl is made myth by the absence of facts and the presence of male hormones, her blank canvas leading to gathering obsession.

Ultimately, Wolff learns his lesson (“what a treacherous thing to believe a person is more than a person,” he intones, with attendant teenage dramatics), and comes-of-age; he and his nerdlinger pals (Austin Abrams, Justice Smith) losing their innocence, sobriety, and virginity, as they prepare to grow up and go their separate ways. It’s run-of-the-mill teen-movie stuff puffed up with a genuine sense of romance and wonder, though lacking any of the subversive qualities that mark the true classics of the genre.

mr holmes

Mr. Holmes has a fine idea for a film: the Sleuth in Winter, where the greatest (fictional) detective that ever was, Sherlock Holmes, finds himself in his 90s, battling with senility; his once magnificent mind now marked by lapses in memory. Holmes is played, with gravity, tragedy, and gentle humour by Ian McKellan. The actor is reunited with director Bill Condon (returning to historical character drama after his still-strange stint with the Twilight Saga finales), with whom he made Gods & Monsters, another portrait of a great man railing against the indignity of his dying days.

Again, Condon works with a story-within-a-story, the elderly protagonist pulled from his cantankerous isolation by the interest of a younger charge. This time it’s his housekeeper’s precocious scamp (Milo Parker), who takes an interest in both his powers of deduction and his fascination with beekeeping. The story moves from the 1947 of the present back to a recent trip to post-war Japan, and the tantalising, just-out-of-reach memories of Holmes’ final case, 30 years prior; dancing through stories-within-stories and key-symbolic-imagery dream sequences. It seeks to find its protagonist peace before death, and to have his particular beliefs —his legacy— passed on to future generations. Meaning, the older the audience, the better it’ll play; this, effectively, a minor drama that’ll utterly delight the Marigold Hotel crowd.

i am big bird

The last time we cinematically peered behind the Sesame Street character to see the muppeteer inside, Being Elmo offered a tender portrait of Kevin Clash that immediately turned troubled when he became entangled in sexual abuse lawsuits. It’s not an auspicious forerunner to I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney story, a sentimental chronicle of the career of the guy behind Big Bird and Oscar The Grouch. It’s a generic documentary that leans on the goodwill of beloved television characters; that openly taps into the fact that you, likely, harbour fond, formative memories of Big Bird deep in your heart. In turn, the film is warm, winsome, and crowd-pleasing, yet, essentially, artistically flat.

far from home

Viggo Mortensen has spent his post-Lord Of The Rings years wantonly wandering far from the traditional mores of stardom; making Spanish-language films in Spain (Alatriste) and Argentina (Everybody Has A Plan and Jauja), the latter marking a collaboration with Lisandro Alonso, one of world cinema’s most singular, minimalist auteurs. Far From Home’s title doubles as a commentary on Mortensen’s approach to casting: this time, he’s speaking French (and even some Arabic!), as a former Legionnaire turned teacher in a far-flung mountain outpost in occupied Algeria. Amidst the earliest uprisings of the Algerian War of Independence, he’s given a thankless task: leading an Algerian criminal (Reda Kateb) across the barren desert to a nearby French settlement.

French director David Oelhoffen mounts Far From Men, effectively, as a war-time Western. Shooting in Morocco, his camera situates Mortensen and Kateb as tiny figures in a vast landscape of red dirt and looming mountains. Though buffeted by the elements (including a memorable rainstorm sequence), what they’re really caught in are the winds of change. The duo —one French, one Algerian— head cross-country through the crossfire between occupiers and rebels, their status as hostages or allies flip-flopping depending on who points a gun at them.

coming home

Coming Home finds Zhang Yimou reunited with his old muse Gong Li, and recapturing the filmmaking form that, in the early-’90s, marked him as the standout director from China’s Fifth Generation. His 18th film is a tragic romance loaded with symbolism. It begins amongst the drab, industrial greys of the Cultural Revolution; where Chen Daoming has escaped from the labour camp he was sent to for being ‘over-educated’, and, on-the-lam, seeks to return home to ex-wife Gong. But his daughter, a ballet prodigy (Zhang Huiwen), has been raised, in his absence, by Communist ideology, and is ready to rat out this ‘enemy of the Party’ if he shows his face.

After a fabulously-mounted, deftly edited showdown between husband, wife, daughter, and police at a train station, Zhang jumps three years forward. The Cultural Revolution has suddenly ended, and Chen is out of prison, again, this time as a free man. But when he comes face-to-face with the wife he hasn’t seen for 20 years, she is now —with dramatic convenience and symbolic richness— suffering from psychogenic amnesia, and can’t reconcile the man before her with the husband of her memory. Zhang uses this to turn the film into a weighty parable: her amnesia China’s cultural amnesia, this drama embodying the way state-sanctioned horrors are repressed, but never quite forgotten.